


Voices

by RadioactiveDeLorean



Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: anti being an ass, but then when isn't he?, glitch bitch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 08:18:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11755776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RadioactiveDeLorean/pseuds/RadioactiveDeLorean
Summary: When Jack starts hearing someone talking to him in the back of his mind, he thinks it's just down to stress. Even with a full stomach and several nights' good rest, however, things only get worse.(A drabble based off the recent activity of a certain demon)





	Voices

**Author's Note:**

> Also over on [My Tumblr](https://radioactivedelorean.tumblr.com) just [ here](http://radioactivedelorean.tumblr.com/post/163991859870/voices)

There’s that voice again.    
  
It keeps popping up from time to time, usually only a faint whisper in the back of the Irishman’s head, something that can easily be ignored with a bit of music. He can barely understand it, anyway. The whispering is too quiet and too raspy to understand, so Jack simply ignores it. It isn’t hurting anyone and it isn’t affecting his sleep, so it shouldn’t matter, right?   
  
Before Jack knows it, it’s getting louder. He starts hearing it more often, usually during the night when he’s up late on his computer, or playing games, or simply just relaxing in his apartment. The whisper turns into a murmur, slightly louder than before but still nothing that seems of any concern. It keeps telling him to stop, to let go, to let someone else have control. At least, that’s what it sounds like. The words are just compilations of simple sounds as if a native Polish speaker was trying to learn English for the first time. Jack only has a minor concern about it and a simple round of something like ‘Hello, Neighbor’ or ‘The Escapists’ certainly helps him forget about it. At least, for a little while.    
  
One day, a week before Halloween, the voice turns into a shout, a scream, a wail from some demon buried deep within Jack’s mind. It’s shrieking in his ears at night when he turns the light off. It’s howling at him when he walks down the street. It’s laughing and jeering at him when he records videos. The words change from simple phonetics to full words. The words are cold and harsh, like pellets of poison in Jack’s ears. It tells him to just give up. To give in. That he’s weak and he won’t last much longer anyway. Again, the voice that speaks them is foreign and unrecognisable, yet leaves Jack with an awful sense of déjà vu. Jack manages to ignore it for a little while.   
  
But then the physical symptoms start. Every so often, a chill will run down Jack’s spine that feels like a bolt of lightning. For perhaps a second, he feels as though he has been ripped from his own body. As quickly as it starts, it’s over and Jack can keep going with whatever he was doing. Sometimes he’s asleep, and for a split second can see his own unconscious body lying in his bed. Other times, he’s eating, and will suddenly start to choke on something. More often than not, however, he’s making a video. He goes back, rewatches the footage he had spent almost two hours recording to see if the camera picked up on what happened. Each time, there is nothing. He only sees himself on his computer screen, shivering as if a cold breeze had just blown in through an open window. He shrugs and pushes it to the back of his mind.    
  
Vaguely, Jack wonders if any of his friends are having strange symptoms like this, or if these are just caused by Jack’s renowned disregard for any sort of sleep schedule. ‘Sleep is for the weak’, he would so proudly proclaim. Yet recently, Jack has been feeling rather weak. He seems to lack the energy he once had. His videos are shorter and seem a little toned-down compared to his other ones. Granted, none of them involve ‘Happy Wheels’, so that might be the case. One game in particular, a virtual-reality game called ‘The Cubicle’, has him rather worn-out. After filming, he simply lies on the floor. His head is aching and he feels the room around him spin and sway like a leaf on the wind. That’s funny: VR games never leave Jack feeling ill like that. Maybe his addiction to video games is just finally catching up to him.    
  
Jack lies on the floor a little while longer until he feels well enough to stand without passing out. He gets himself a glass of water and something to eat. Maybe he’s simply dehydrated? Low blood sugar? Hunger? Lack of sleep? Jack chuckles to himself at that one. He’d pulled all-nighters before and had functioned just fine the next morning. It’s probably just dehydration, he tells himself. He makes sure he drinks plenty over the rest of the day, before having an early night, going to bed just an hour after his second upload of the day.    
  
That voice is back again, louder than before. It almost sounds as if someone is talking to him through a corrupted microphone, the voice laced with static and odd sounds missed out entirely. Jack frowns a little as he lies in bed, waiting for sleep to come and take over. He’s definitely hearing things. He checks his ears a hundred times. Maybe there’s a loose bit of wax that’s causing his ears to distort sounds? Jack assures himself that he’s fine and that it’s probably just his imagination taunting him for playing too many video games. He eventually drifts off to sleep, the voice’s jeering lowering to merely a hum in his ears.   
  
Jack wakes up on the day of the thirty-first with a pounding headache and a churning stomach. He tries to calm the headache with a couple of painkillers and plenty of water, but as the day progresses, the headache only gets worse. Jack doesn’t eat anything that day, knowing that putting food into his churning stomach will only make everything worse. He keeps the videos for the day rather simple - carving a pumpkin, followed by a round of something easy, like ‘Reading your Comments’ or perhaps ‘Subnautica’, as it’s been a while since had last played that. 

 

As Jack starts the recording and sits down at the table, pumpkin at the ready, he is struck by another wave of nausea and dizziness. He forces that feeling down and gets going. Throughout the video, he keeps hearing sounds in his apartment. Heavy footsteps, giggling, whispering. He gets up once or twice, but there is never anything there. The voice in his ears is louder than ever. It’s laughing at him now and the words are clear as day. Just as Jack tries to carve the extra little details into his pumpkin, he feels his body go stiff. He can’t move. He can’t speak. Heck, he can barely  _ think.  _ He feels himself lift his arm, the small vegetable knife in one hand. He feels his body move of its own accord, taking the knife closer and closer to his throat. His thoughts scream at him to stop, the voice much louder now. Before Jack can stop himself, he drags the blade across his throat, slices his trachea wide open, and collapses on top of the pumpkin.    
  
The voice is laughing now and all of a sudden Jack feels himself get thrown out of his body. He hovers perhaps two feet above it, watching as his body slowly raises its head, staring directly into the camera. The laughter is a high-pitched shriek in Jack’s ears and if he had a physical form, hands to move with and a head to feel, he would have slammed his palms over his ears to block out the noise. But he can’t. He’s nothing right now. Nothing more than a spirit, a ghost, a bodiless soul floating in some awful limbo between life and death. He watches as the body,  _ his  _ body, moves and talks all on its own.

 

Jack knows that there’s no way his body should be able to do that. Its throat is wide open like a predator’s jaws, blood dripping down its neck and soaking steadily into the front of the black top it is wearing. Jack can hear the air whistle in and out of the hole in the windpipe as the body speaks with air it isn’t receiving. The voice taunts the camera, speaking of how Jack was weak, and that it was only a matter of time before  _ he  _ broke free from the prison Jack had him caged up in. It sneers, knowing that the viewers would be confused and possibly even  _ scared  _ by what they’re seeing when the video goes out. The body’s face is twisted into a sadistic smirk, eyes glinting with malice. Once or twice, Jack sees all light and colour fade from them completely, leaving soulless black pits where his blue irises should have been. 

 

The voice snarls, saying that Jack is never going to come back, and just like that, everything goes white. The last thing in Jack’s ears before he fades completely is a menacing snarl.

 

“Say goodbye…”

 

0000

 

Jack sits bolt upright, drenched in cold sweat. He trembles like a leaf. That voice is in his ears again for the first time in months. The last time he heard it was on Halloween, the day he had lost control for the first time. He had felt himself slit his throat open, but had woken up hours later as if nothing had happened. The first thing he had done was rush into the bathroom. There wasn’t a single mark on his neck, nor any blood on his top. There’s nothing wrong with him. Even the voice in his ears is silent. 

 

Shakily, Jack slips out of bed and goes to take a shower, knowing that the hot water will definitely help him to relax. He carries on with his day as normal: have breakfast, record a couple of videos, have lunch, edit and upload the videos with a break for food in between, then spend the rest of his evening on social media before heading back to bed. Things don’t seem too bad that day. At least, not as bad as they were back in October.    
  
When nothing else unusual happens for a few days, Jack decides that his nightmare was simply a one-off occasion. The voice in his head hasn’t spoken to him in months, aside from a few days ago. He had no idea what had been happening to him but had decided that it would be best if he simply moved on and forgot about it. So that’s exactly what he does. He continues with his life as normal. 

 

Everything changes when the same symptoms as before show up again. The dizziness, the sickness, the voice in his ear, the bolts of lightning down his spine that forces his soul out of his body. Everything sets Jack on edge again. His gameplay gets worse as fear starts to set in. His recordings become shorter and less confident. He constantly has to edit out moments where he loses focus due to the voice in his head, or where he doubles over, feeling his stomach lurch. As July draws to a close, these moments become more and more frequent until eventually, Jack is deleting entire videos, having to start all over again because he had to rush to the bathroom in the middle of one, swiftly vomiting his guts out. 

 

Jack, the stubborn Irish bastard he is, never tells his friends or his viewers what is going on. Half of him thinks he's just seeing things, that the voices and the blackouts were just due to stress and lack of sleep. The other half knows that something is wrong, but believes that nobody will believe him.  This half thinks that anybody he tells will just think he's gone insane, or that this is some sort of elaborate setup for a future video. He knows damn well that people won't believe him, so he keeps it to himself.

 

Before Jack knows it, it's the first of August and things are still getting worse. The voice in his head is louder now than it was before and the words are just the same. The voice tells him to stop fighting it, to give in to the force that is already consuming so much of his energy. To let the voice take over. To let all Jack's worries and stress float away. Jack blocks it out of his mind, knowing that if he listens to it, things will only get much worse. He keeps going the best he can, his daily activities helping him to ignore the voice.   
  
This only works for two days, however. On the third of August, Jack wakes up with an agonising headache and a stomach that feels like a cement mixer. It takes him a full hour before he can muster up the strength to even get out of bed. He skips eating breakfast, knowing that if he tries, he will just feel far worse and will likely end up throwing up. At lunch, however, he decides that he has to eat something, so he makes himself a sandwich before going to set up the game for the newest video. He decides that a round of Bio Inc Redemption shouldn’t put too much strain on his aching head. 

 

The game starts out fairly well, Jack explaining to his viewers that the developers had added a ‘Jacksepticeye’ Easter Egg to the game. It gave the patient a rather large replica head of the Irishman, his face contorted into a rather uncomfortable-looking grin. Within a few minutes, however, Jack feels a churning in his stomach and tastes stomach acid in his throat. He clamps a hand over his mouth and untangles himself from his headphones as quickly as he can. He rushes into the bathroom, just about managing to get the toilet lid up before he vomits, his eyes watering. Everything seems to go rather fuzzy and Jack stumbles back, sitting with his back against the bathtub. His head is spinning and he feels dreadful. Before he can manage to find the strength to move, he collapses on the bathroom floor and faints. Something comes into the bathroom, lifts him up and lays him down in his bed. 

 

There’s that voice again. 

 

It’s in his head. It’s louder than it had ever been before, even on Halloween. It’s taunting him, jeering at him, mocking him. Jack feels sick, even though he’s certain there’s nothing more in his stomach that he could possibly lose. His head is pounding agonizingly and he knows that if he tries to even sit up, he’ll black out again. Jack has no other choice but to lie there as the voice taunts him. It calls him weak. Pathetic. Useless. It calls him a coward and a loser. Jack can’t block it out this time. It surrounds him, coming from everywhere in the room around him and from inside his head too for good measure. Jack tries to bury his head under his pillow to block the noise out, but it only gets louder. Before he knows it, Jack is screaming and thrashing, trying to get the voice to stop.    
  
And then everything goes quiet. There is no voice. There is no taunting, or jeering, or laughter. There’s nothing but silence, the only noise the sound of Jack’s ragged breathing. Before Jack can move, however, he feels himself being thrown from his body, his spirit hitting the bedroom wall and falling to the floor. As he gets up, he watches as his body moves by itself. He feels dread shoot through him.    
  
It’s happening again.    
  
All of a sudden, the black top is back and so is the laughter. Only this time, instead of coming from everywhere around him. It comes directly from his own mouth. At least, the mouth on the body. He watches in mute horror as his body leaves the room and goes back to his recording setup, rather forcefully dragging the camera over to stand it up in the middle of the room. Jack tries to complain that his body will damage his recording equipment but knows it’s fruitless. He watches as the body slowly lifts its head. The gash on his neck is back, the blood dried and stuck to the skin. The skin is pale and the body isn’t breathing at all.    
  
The eyes are what scares Jack the most. They’re dead, empty. As if the life and light behind them had been snuffed out like a candle in the rain. Every so often, they’ll go completely black and Jack watches as his own face sneers into the camera, a malicious grin stretching his mouth unnaturally wide. The body seems to twitch and shake under the management of this … whatever he could be called. Jack had seen plenty of things online calling him ‘Antisepticeye’, or simply just ‘Anti’. Another one of these reverse versions of the YouTuber themselves. Jack was already more than aware of Darkiplier, something that had been floating around in the depths of Mark’s channel for years now. 

 

The difference here, though, is that Darkiplier was intentional. Anti was never something Jack had planned. He just started having these awful headaches and hearing a voice in his head. His recorded footage for his videos had seemed perfectly normal whenever he’d had these blackouts in the middle of filming, but by the time they were uploaded, they were full of awful glitches and static and for brief moments, a second figure could be seen in the corner, overlapping Jack’s own reactions. Jack doesn’t know how to get rid of these glitches and he sure as hell didn’t put them there himself. He decides that there’s nothing he can do but simply upload the videos as they are. 

  
Anti’s words are so muffled by his own static that Jack can’t understand a single one of them. He almost seems to glitch in front of the camera, like a corrupted video file or something out of a horror movie. It almost reminds Jack of the way the animatronics behave towards the last few nights of the first ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ game, their bodies twitching and jerking unnaturally, muffled gurgles and wails escaping their mouths. Except there’s nothing about Anti’s words that describes dead children. Well, there  _ might  _ be, but Jack can’t understand a word of it through the ugly static still pouring out around the words that leave Anti’s mouth.    
  
Anti snarls into the camera for a full two minutes before the lights in Jack’s apartment go out, plunging the whole room into darkness. Jack feels something akin to a freight train hit him and his mind goes completely blank, the last sound in his ears before unconsciousness takes hold of him being Anti’s laughter.    
  
Jack wakes up on the floor a few minutes later, the voice and the migraine both gone from his head. He slowly gets to his feet, hesitantly putting a hand to his neck. There’s nothing there. There is no cut and his shirt has returned to the one he was wearing before. Breathing a small sigh of relief, Jack returns his camera to the rest of his recording equipment, noticing that the camera had already been switched off and the computers were all shut down. Running a hand through his hair, Jack decides to do something he’s never done willingly on his channel before - break his posting schedule. He gets something to eat, takes a shower and goes straight to bed, feeling too drained to do anything other than sleep at the moment.    
  
He wakes up to hundreds if not  _ thousands  _ of messages from friends, family and fans, asking if he was alright. He replies to as many as he can before he realises that he’s overwhelmed by them completely. He records a quick video, explaining that he is fine and that Anti is gone. By the time he’s uploaded it, word has already got out that Jack is fine. This puts his mind at ease and he resumes his normal schedule.    
  
Twice in one year, Jack has had to deal with the fear of having his spirit torn from his body. By all logic, he shouldn’t even be alive right now. Yet he is. He’s breathing and moving and  _ living,  _ despite Anti’s best efforts to take him down. Jack already knows the warning signs by now and he’ll be more than ready if Anti ever shows up again. 


End file.
